Dental mirrors are used by dentists, dental hygienists, and other practitioners to allow indirect vision inside the mouth, reflect light onto desired surfaces, and retract soft tissue. Typically the mirror is at a fixed angle relative to the handle, which renders many positions ergonomically challenging and can lead to practitioner fatigue and unnecessarily long procedure times. Some dental mirrors purport to address these problems by enabling the mirror to tilt from side to side, but that mimics manual rotation of the tool in the patient's mouth and similarly leads to awkward positions for the practitioner.
The challenge with existing dental mirrors is that they do not permit the angle of the face of the mirror to be changed relative to the handle, which would be useful to change the angle of reflection and thereby change the surface seen in the mirror. Although existing dental mirrors are available with mirrors fixed at different angles relative to the handle, changing the angle of reflection requires removing the tool from a patient's mouth and inserting a different tool. It would be desirable to have a dental mirror than lets the practitioner change the angle of reflection of the mirror while the tool is in the patient's mouth.